Why should manufacturers embrace B2B? The global landscape is shifting and companies must achieve more with fewer resources amidst the uncertainties of both business and microeconomic conditions.
Currently, customer experts observe that more and more businesses must adjust to changing customer demands. The landscape of technology is evolving, with manufacturers and distributors adopting new selling strategies driven by advancements in data, AI, and innovative collaboration methods.
We believe that the majority of business buyers are already present online and anticipate the industry to align with their digital presence. With B2B sites, customers can access the website 24/7 and make any purchase anytime.
Business buyers prefer to interact with sellers exclusively when they have specific questions or concerns. Modern technology lets you take every aspect of your business online, including order entry, client information, and customer service.
By automating and streamlining these various processes, companies can cut down on unnecessary costs. A B2B website can help you discover new insights and opportunities by collecting and analyzing data on your website, enabling businesses with upselling and new cross-selling tech strategies, ultimately contributing to revenue growth.
Architecture
Now, let’s delve into how it all comes together.
Your B2B portal is connected to your current Finance and Operations with the help of a commerce scale unit (CSU). The commerce scale unit is a next-generation, high-performance platform that Dynamics Commerce offers to host the endless commerce engine. Thus, data seamlessly flows between the CSU, Finance and Operations, and the B2B portal.
The B2B portal is a fully operational website with all the necessary functionalities. So, you can consider it a vital part of your current ecosystem.
Capabilities
Similar to your current Finance and Operations and Supply Chain Management system, you can handle order fulfillment either through your current advanced warehouse app or directly through your Finance and Operations interface. The end-to-end process seamlessly integrates with the B2B portal, connecting with the advanced warehouse.
All these capabilities provide out-of-the-box solutions, so let’s delve into each one.
Experience Management
Commerce enables you to quickly and easily design, develop, and refresh your self-serve B2B website, making it attractive and aligned with your brand.
Dynamics B2B websites offer the flexibility of multiple environments, allowing you to develop in your local box and then deploy it to VOT, or even copy it directly to your production environment.
It also provides reusable templates and layouts, enabling you to easily create and design the layout to enforce branding on your website. Furthermore, it has a full SDK that helps you unpack and explore existing modules, and even extend them as needed depending on your business. You can package and deploy your current themes, modules, and data actions to LCS, similar to what you do for SCM currently.
Finally, this is an omnichannel media management solution that gives you the flexibility to utilize your existing media and incorporate your current marketing and merchandising materials, including images, videos, PDFs, etc.
Merchandising & Inventory
Businesses need tools to define and govern which products a business buyer can purchase and the prices associated with those products. Commerce provides support for unlimited channels, allowing you to manage all your brands for all your markets in one centralized location. You can reuse assortments, meaning you create products once and reuse them across your channels.
You can manage pricing in one centralized location with the ability to provide channel and category-specific pricing, set up in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. This means you can even use your current SCM pricing.
Inventory is managed in Dynamics Finance and Operations, enabling you to transfer inventory across channels, manage stock counts, and establish replenishment groups and rules. You can also have customizable product attributes that enable customers to find products with specific attributes, driving search refinements on the website.
Moreover, marketers can easily add compelling brand and product narratives to Dynamics pages using Co-pilot. It can help you generate those special product narratives you are looking for in your brand.
Finally, your brand merchandiser can create unique catalogs for a customer or a group of customers to govern the products they run.
Account Management
Dynamics 365 Commerce provides the capability for your business buyers to submit an onboarding request. This is an out-of-the-box form where you can request your business partners, buyers, to provide information that can be reviewed in Finance and Operations.
Once the details are reviewed in Finance and Operations, the person responsible for approving these requests can approve them and then hand it over to the finance department for credit allocation.
As Commerce is built on top of Finance and Operations, we leverage the standard credit management module. Using the credit management module, the finance department can set up the credit information for the business partner. Once completed, they can notify the business partner that they are now enabled to sign in on the website and begin their purchasing journey.
Once onboarded, and a credit line is established, users from the buying organization can log in to the website, and the authorization step, determining who is authorized to make online purchases, can be handled seamlessly.
Order Capture
The B2B website is constructed using the building blocks of the B2C website, providing standard browsing and searching capabilities that you would expect on a B2C site. Commerce empowers your business buyers to quickly find the products they want to purchase and offers several features to facilitate faster purchase flows:
- Bulk ordering with variant matrix view;
- Reusable order templates;
- Reorder items;
- Order by SKU;
- Order on behalf of customers.
Order Fulfillment & Invoice
As Commerce is built on Finance and Operations, it leverages the standard fulfillment options of the product. The individuals responsible for fulfilling orders can utilize the existing Pick, Pack, Ship, and Invoice features.
Users who are already familiar with the product can seamlessly use these capabilities to fulfill orders placed through the B2B eCommerce site.
Once the order is fulfilled, or fulfillment is in process, the B2B website can be accessed by your buyers to view the order status, tracking information, as well as details regarding invoices, payments, and settlement.